Because it’s all good.
It began, as most magnificent disasters do, on an unremarkable Tuesday.
He was standing at the kitchen counter in his boxers, eating cold lasagna straight out of the Pyrex, frowning at the crossword. He scratched his ribs. He chewed. He said, “Ten letters, ‘state of confusion,'” to no one in particular. And she, standing in the doorway with her coffee, was struck by a thought so large it nearly knocked her into the refrigerator.
She had not kissed all of him.
Eleven years of marriage. Tens of thousands of kisses, conservatively. And yet there were entire regions of this man her mouth had never visited. Whole provinces. The back of his left knee, for God’s sake. She had never once kissed the back of his left knee. What kind of wife was she?
“Take off your shirt,” she said.
He looked up. “It’s 7:40 in the morning.”
“I’m aware.”
“I have a meeting at nine.”
“Then we should get started.”
He took off his shirt, because he is not a stupid man.
The Survey
She explained the project while he finished the lasagna. Every square inch. Top to bottom. No exceptions, no skipping, no “that part doesn’t count.”
“Define every,” he said.
“Every.”
He thought about this with his whole face. “Including…”
“Yes.”
“And the…”
“Especially the.”
“Do I get a say in this?”
“You get a vote,” she said. “But I beg you not to veto.”
He set the fork down slowly, like a man surrendering a weapon. “Bewildered,” he said. “Ten letters. That’s the crossword. Also me.”
Let’s be clear about one thing. She is not a brave woman nobly overcoming her disgust in the name of love. She has no disgust. She checked. She looked at him — the whole rumpled, hairy, faintly lasagna-scented totality of him — and found not one square inch she didn’t want her mouth on. The armpit is not a sacrifice. The armpit is a destination.
North
She started at the top, because she is a woman of method.
The crown of his head has, in recent years, developed a small shiny clearing he believes no one has noticed. She has noticed. She kissed it three times, because once seemed stingy.
“You’re kissing my bald spot.”
“I’m kissing your skylight.”
She kissed his eyelids and felt them flutter like something trapped and pleased about it. She kissed the deep groove between his eyebrows that appears when he does the taxes. She kissed the tip of his nose and then — she will not apologize for this — the little crease where his nostril meets his cheek, which nobody in the history of the world has ever kissed, and which tasted of salt and his ridiculous mint face wash.
His ears were a whole afternoon. The folds. The little canyon behind the lobe that smells exactly like him, like warm bread and pencil shavings. On the top rim of his left ear she discovered three long, wiry hairs standing up like antennae, receiving signals from God knows where.
She kissed them. Individually.
“I’m going to trim those,” he said.
“Over my dead body.”
She chased his Adam’s apple up and down his throat while he tried to swallow, which made him laugh, which made it bob, which made her chase it harder, which is how they both ended up on the kitchen floor.
The Armpit Negotiations
He clamped his arm to his side like a man guarding state secrets.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t showered. I’m a mammal. There’s a whole ecosystem in there.”
“I’m aware of the ecosystem. I’d like to pay my respects.”
The negotiations lasted four minutes and included one attempted bribe (a back rub), one counteroffer (after his shower), and one decisive tactical maneuver involving the ticklish spot on his ribs. The arm came up. She went in.
It smelled like him. Not the deodorant, which had lost that war around six a.m., but him — warm, animal, unmistakable. She kissed the soft hollow, the coarse hair, the tender skin at the edge where arm becomes chest. He was laughing so hard he was crying.
“That,” he gasped, “is the most disgusting thing anyone has ever done to me.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, and did the other one.
The Middle Territories
Elbows. Nobody kisses elbows. She kissed both, plus the rough patch on the right one he keeps meaning to put lotion on. Knuckles, all ten. The white scar on his thumb from the time he tried to open a coconut with a screwdriver and a great deal of misplaced confidence. The inside of his wrist, where his pulse was running noticeably faster than it had at breakfast.
His belly — the soft part he sucks in whenever a camera appears — she kissed with such enthusiasm that she accidentally blew a raspberry, which set them both off again. His belly button was briefly a point of contention.
“There’s lint in here.”
“There’s been lint in there since the Clinton administration. Leave it. It’s load-bearing.”
She kissed it anyway. Lint and all.
The Back Forty
She made him lie face down on the bed, and he went with the weary dignity of a man at the dentist.
His shoulders are freckled, a whole constellation left over from a youth spent shirtless on boats. She decided to kiss each freckle individually, lost count somewhere around thirty, and started over.
“Did you just start over?”
“I lost my place.”
“There are forty-seven.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t,” he said into the pillow. “I just want you to stop counting and keep going.”
She kissed the long valley of his spine, vertebra by vertebra, and the two dimples at the base of it that she privately considers the finest architectural feature in the state of California. (Sorry, Golden Gate.) And then, naturally, she arrived at his ass.
She kissed it with the reverence of a pilgrim and the enthusiasm of a Labrador. Both cheeks. Thoroughly. The crease where they meet his thighs. And she did not stop where polite women stop, because she is not, and has never once claimed to be, a polite woman.
“I’d like it on the record,” he said, muffled and slightly higher-pitched than usual, “that I am a grown man with a mortgage.”
“So noted,” she said, and kept going.
The Front, Briefly
He rolled over. Let’s just say he’d been enjoying himself.
His cock she had kissed many times before, with tremendous pleasure, so she greeted it the way you greet a beloved old friend you’ve bumped into at a party: warmly, at length, with real affection. But she had never, she realized, given proper attention to his balls — those crinkled, absurd, defenseless things men regard with a mixture of pride and mild embarrassment. She kissed them as though they were the most precious objects in the house. Which, in her considered opinion, they are.
The project was suspended for approximately forty minutes, for reasons that are none of your business.
He texted his nine o’clock that he was “handling a domestic situation.”
South
The backs of his knees were exactly as soft as she’d hoped. His shin carries a long, faded scar from a hike on which he insisted he knew a shortcut. His ankles are knobby. His feet—
Look. His feet are not beautiful. His feet look like they marched across Europe in 1944 and lost. His second toe is longer than his big toe and curves slightly inward, as if trying to get a better look at something. There’s a callus on his right heel you could strike a match on.
She kissed every toe and did “this little piggy” on the way. When she kissed the sole of his right foot he kicked her, pure reflex, then apologized so sweetly while she lay laughing on the floor holding her shoulder that she had to climb back up and kiss his whole face again, which set the project back a good fifteen minutes.
By noon she declared victory. He lay flat on his back, pink, dazed, and grinning like a man who’d been hit by a very affectionate truck.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
He stared at the ceiling a long time. “Thoroughly accounted for.”
The Oversight
Four days later, in the cereal aisle at Safeway, she stopped dead with a box of Cheerios in her hand.
“Oh!” she said. “I haven’t kissed the arch of his left foot!”
She said it out loud. To the cereal. The way you’d remember you left the stove on.
He was holding the cart. A woman reaching for the Raisin Bran turned and looked at him with tremendous interest.
“Not here,” he said.
“I did the right arch. I distinctly remember the right arch. I must have gotten distracted by the toe.”
“Everyone gets distracted by the toe.”
“It’s going to bother me.”
“Not,” he said, “in the Safeway.”
She pulled out the grocery list and wrote, under eggs and coffee filters: Left arch. Underlined twice.
That night he presented the foot without being asked. She kissed the arch slowly, reverently, and he lay there with his hands behind his head and said, “Better?” And she said, “So much better,” and meant it with her entire soul.
The Audit
It turns out you can’t finish a man. She keeps finding places. The hollow above his collarbone. The tiny crease between his ring finger and pinky. The spot under his jaw that only appears when he tips his head back to laugh — which, thanks to her, is often.
And here’s the part nobody warned her about: he started helping.
He leaves notes on the bathroom mirror in dry-erase marker. Left earlobe — unconfirmed. Inside of right elbow — rushed job. Once, simply: Re-inspection requested. Entire back. Mostly because I liked it.
He has discovered what it feels like to be wanted from his skylight to his calluses, and he has decided, very reasonably, that he would like more of that, please.
One night she laid her lips flat against his chest, right over his heart, and didn’t kiss so much as stay. She could feel it going under her mouth — steady, stubborn, his. Neither of them said anything for a long time. Some square inches you don’t kiss. You listen to them.
Forever, Give or Take
“You know you’ll never finish,” he said last week, in the dark.
“I’ve thought about that,” she said. “I read that your outer layer of skin replaces itself about once a month. So every few weeks, technically, I’ve got a whole new husband to cover.”
He was quiet a moment.
“So I’m a subscription.”
“You’re a lifetime subscription. Auto-renewing. No cancellations.”
He laughed — that low, sleepy laugh she’d marry him for all over again. She heard him shift under the covers. And then, in the dark, something warm and knobby and entirely unbeautiful nudged gently against her shin.
His left foot.
“Arch,” he said. “In case you forgot.”
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Companion Song:
— Kiss You All Over, Exile, 1978
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and provocateur whose work explores love, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and the magnificent complexity of being human. For more than three decades, she has explored what helps people connect more deeply, love more courageously, and create extraordinary relationships. Her writing blends psychology, spirituality, humor, and eroticism, with a particular passion for restoring the dignity and value of men and exploring the possibilities of Hot and Holy Love. At the heart of her work is a simple conviction: all human beings deserve and are capable of extraordinary love — and a beautiful life.
